


Falling Towards Entropy

by blackidyll



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: (kind of), Artificial Intelligence, Established Relationship, M/M, Offscreen character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-09
Updated: 2014-03-09
Packaged: 2018-01-15 03:23:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1289338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackidyll/pseuds/blackidyll
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's at a private airfield when the phone turns on, a single buzz, then another two in succession: a text message. It surprises James enough that he bothers to check—</p><p>  <i>You promised me that you wouldn't be needlessly reckless anymore</i></p><p>—and the sudden cold rage that rises in his chest makes everything go crystal clear, and he rips the entire frame off the control panel of the small civilian plane, uncaring of the mess he leaves behind. It's a low blow to use Q's words, a facsimile of his voice, when it's Q himself that James allowed himself to be teetered to, the only other entity beyond his duty to Queen and country—</p><p>The second text comes in, and it's only because the phone was Q's that James doesn't immediately disable it, a crunch of metal and glass on the smooth tarmac.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Falling Towards Entropy

**Author's Note:**

> I'm trying hard to finish off the fifth story in _Traceability_ , and as I entered the home stretch on that fic the muses went on strike and refused to let me write anything until I got this out of my system.
> 
> This is only quickly edited because I wanted to get back to my other projects. Hopefully it still reads coherently!

It was a complete accident, one of those things that is just fated to happen. No one thinks of the risks involved with being an MI6 support staff when the life expectancy of a field agent is very much shorter; all of James' contingencies involve the coming of his death. He never thought that one day he'd come back from a mission to Eve fiercely intercepting him before he can get through MI6's security checkpoints, much less into Q Branch.

They really should have planned for this. After all, Q's predecessor had gone the same way – working on a prototype, a sudden collapse in the structural integrity of the device, setting off its volatile core. Instead of letting them bring him to Medical (to ease the pain, nothing more, his heart too badly damaged for anything to be but a temporary patch work), Q dragged himself to his office, locking it down completely. When Tanner finally broke in, they found him collapsed across his workstation, all relevant MI6 data reallocated to Riley, his personal systems wiped clean.

No, James always thought if Q was ever in danger that he would be _there_ , perfectly willing to fight to protect what's his. When Vesper—with Vesper, he’d had an entire organization to hunt down, plenty of targets to assuage his silent fury on. This time, however, there is nothing – no enemies, no entities to take revenge upon, the prototype already destroyed.

In face of this uncaring fate, a simple side effect of the world naturally falling towards entropy, James finds himself completely lost.

He lets Eve take the kit from him, shove the phone into his hands ("we’re supposed to turn this in per policy, but I don't care; he bothered to leave that note to me, he wanted you to have it") and even listens, when she tells him to wait and that she’ll get him the information he needs, lest he do something unduly reckless.

Control – he has it. He just needs a moment to find it.

\---

James would have much rather head back to the field, but someone slapped a mandatory leave order on his file, and he hasn’t been able to figure out who did it or how to get it reversed.

He goes back to Q's flat. Where else would he go? The place MI6 provided for him had only ever been a stopover, a temporary place to recuperate before leaving on another mission, but Q's flat contained Q and his technology and everything that represented (trust and security, the promise of quiet understanding).

It occurs to him that MI6 should have reclaimed the flat by now, stripped it clean, but perhaps they don't know where Q's flat is any more than James did a year ago, before Q let himself be found.

(If he checked the system, if he managed to crack his way in, he would have found that that section of Q's profile had been modified, the sanitization order oddly logged as "completed".)

Q had installed an alarm system coded to James' biometric and facial recognition data that chimes like a cat's collar bell when it detects him (a joke, really, Q too exasperated at how often James sneaks – snuck - up on him). It chimes steadily for the first three days, each time he enters the flat through the front door, the windows, then abruptly stops, leaving James half nauseous with the loss and half relieved that there is one less reminder stabbing into him as he moves about the flat.

When he goes out – because he does go out, for food and to escape the confines of the flat when it begins closing in on him – he doesn't notice the street cameras trailing his route, breaking from their assigned monitoring to watch him pass by. He does notice that something always intervenes each time he comes upon some thugs, a gang, even common petty thieves – a security alarm going off, a sudden siren wail of a police car, with no police car in sight even minutes later, a strategic change of the traffic lights, green flicking to red. The few times he does get into an altercation, he comes out mostly unscathed.

The phone doesn't do anything: no voice mails, no documents, no saved registries, presumably reset at the same time Q wiped his personal systems clean at headquarters. If James doesn't keep it charged, the phone automatically turns itself off. He still can't bring himself to break it down into its component parts to investigate, or to leave it behind. 

He has it tucked in his breast pocket when he hijacks a mission from an MI6 agent – not another Double-O; James isn’t stupid – uncoiled energy singing in his veins. He ends up spending most of his time not avoiding other agents but circumventing the strange cacophony of blocked roads (he doesn't need GPS to find or make detours), machines rejecting his cards, debit and credit (he lifts wallets instead, paying with cash), and finally, the computer systems in his car failing completely. He almost crashes out of the car – who puts on seatbelts when you're spoiling for an adrenaline rush? – managing to walk away with just a limp.

The interferences stop after that, and James smiles grimly; whoever is blocking him obviously doesn't want him dead, and he’s bored of being sidelined like a rookie, the forced inactivity killing him more effectively than any day out in the field ever did.

He's at a private airfield when the phone turns on, a single buzz, then another two in succession: a text message. It surprises James enough that he bothers to check—

> _You promised me that you wouldn't be needlessly reckless anymore_

—and the sudden cold rage that rises in his chest makes everything go crystal clear, and he rips the entire frame off the control panel of the small civilian plane, uncaring of the mess he leaves behind. It's a low blow to use Q's words, a facsimile of his voice, when it's _Q himself_ that James allowed himself to be teetered to, the only other entity beyond his duty to Queen and country—

The second text comes in, and it's only because the phone was Q's that James doesn't immediately disable it, a crunch of metal and glass on the smooth tarmac.  

> _0101010001010111010101110100001101010101_

It takes James a moment to decode the binary string (a memory of Q patiently explaining ASCII, how each letter was assigned a number, then translated to an 8-bit code representing that number in decimal, and vindictively sending him acronyms in nothing but ASCII code until James could translate them in under thirty seconds), five letters: _TWWCU_ , and it’s fortunate he’s a seasoned agent; he doesn’t react, at least not physically.  

(in his mind, however, another memory: of cornering Q for the first time, triumphant at solving the mystery, Q's startled laughter – he hadn't expected James to find his flat, to find _him_ so quickly – and the moment of sobriety when James asked him outright, giving him an out, and Q's answer, conviction in his eyes—

"A little late for that, Bond, not with the way I've come undone, the way you've undone me."

"The way _we've_ come undone," James had replied, leaning down—)

James slides down into the cockpit, pulling the glass frame down over his head, sealing himself in. His hands are steady on the phone, his breathing calm, and he doesn't hesitate when he sends back a single letter, no punctuation.

> _Q_

(He saw the video footage, the bloody scene left in Q's office, temporarily sealed off, the genuine sadness and pain in Eve's eyes – and yes, the autopsy report and photographs, the accident happening days before James had finished his mission. But stranger things have happened, and that code, that phrase; no one else could possibly know, no one else could replicate it)

> _Yes_

—comes the reply, before the phone powers off and the cockpit lights flicker to life, soothingly dim, the control system turning itself on, encrypting itself, temporarily hiding its signals, hiding James.

James doesn't know if the message is true or if it's some terrifyingly astute AI that Q has constructed; for this one moment, carved out of the chaos that is his life, he just sits there, phone cradled carefully in one hand, and lets his quartermaster watch over him.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the CBS series _Person of Interest_ \- a sort of POI!fusion where rather than building the Machine ("a mass surveillance computer system programmed to monitor and analyze data from surveillance cameras, electronic communications, and audio input throughout the world"), Q _becomes_ the Machine after his death. Sci-fi!AU? Crazy advanced technology AU? It's-not-really-Q-but-a-really-good-composition-of-his-personality-and-memories-and-quirks AU? I have no idea :|
> 
> (Yes, I ripped off [_the way we come undone_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/926127) for this ficlet, with the quote and the flat thing. Rest assured that this is not a continuation or indication of what things will happen in that verse; in my head, Bond and Bailey go on many merry missions after that, increasingly armed with and protected by Q and Estelle's creations.)


End file.
